An Open Letter to People who Buy Gold, Levels, and Honour

A guildie of ours was hacked this week. Her character was stripped naked, robbed, and left to die on a lowbie map (but not until the hacker /gquit). She had only recently discovered Heroics, and doesn’t have a lot of time to play. Every piece of gear she owned was earned and fought for and incredibly precious because of how little time she can spend playing a game she loves.

You stole that from her. You did that to her. You.

Before leaving her naked and guildless, the hacker took advantage of our guild’s structure which allows unlimited item withdrawals from our 6 tab GB because whatever other problems our guild may have, we trust every member of it. The gear, the crafting mats, the gems, the enchants, the recipes, the consumables…these things were in there because someone found it or made it and thought: “Hey! I bet a guildie could use this. Instead of selling it for epic Gs, I will donate it to the GB in keeping with the spirit of collaboration and generosity the guild was founded on.”

What were you thinking when you stole it all from us by paying a stranger to play this game for you? Were you thinking it would just be easier, faster than leveling yourself? Than running dailies for a week or two? Than farming mats for the AH? Is that what you were thinking?

I’m glad the years our guild has spent building ourselves up and filling every tab of that GB with something meant to help our members with leveling and raiding and professions was able to save an hour of effort on your part.

You robbed our guild bank. You stole, disenchanted, and sold all of our shit when you gave those fuckers your credit card number. You.

Here is what I want you to understand: the gold you are purchasing is not earned by the person you’re buying it from. It’s stolen from the people you’re playing this game with. Your PuGs, and your guild, and your friends list. When you purchase leveling or honour services, you are handing your username and password over to the same people who are eventually going to rob you of all your gold to sell it back to people like you. They’ll rob your guild, too. Sometimes they delete your character.

You have turned gold farming and account hacking into a profitable business by trading real world money for in-game services. You are the reason they hack and steal and ruin the game for the rest of us.

You hack and steal and ruin the game for the rest of us. Not some guy at a computer in Korea.

You.

Do us all a favour and suspend your account. The rest of us are actually trying to play a game here – you’re just paying someone to steal the results of our work, spam the trade with their adverts using our characters and get us suspended or worse, delete the characters outright, and destroy everything we’ve been working to accomplish since we started playing the game. And all so you don’t have to actually play the game you’re paying $15 a month to play?

I fucking hate snakes and ladders, but I don’t pay someone else to play it for me. I just quit the fucking game.

I’m glad you can afford that mammoth, though. I hope it was worth destroying my guildie’s hard-earned progress, to say nothing of her week as she works with Blizzard to figure everything out, and punishing my entire guild for the sake of your greed.

I’m sure she will. I haven’t heard of a time when they haven’t returned the stuff that was taken – according to Blizz I already have a mailbox overloaded with our GB stuff returned, so that’s good too.

The “it won’t happen to me” is very prevalent – it was me until a while ago, and even then I only got an authenticator after this happened. We’ve been hammering our guild with it since, though, encouraging them to get authenticators and make sure they’re not doing anything sketchy online.

This has happened to us previously and in fact it happened to one of our long time members last night. He was stripped naked and left broke as well. After he got the account back and got on, he made the analogy to being raped. While Im not comparing it to that but i can see how he feels.

We also had an unlimited withdrawal policy for many years, but after a rash of hacking we changed to a max of 4 items per tab. We didnt want to do it, we hated it and cursed it, but in the end we had to protect ourselves and the guild. We found that 4 items was a good balance of being able to get what they need and protection of the GB contents. The only time this was inconvient is if members were using the GB to pass multiple stacks of frostweave from a Member in Dal to a Member in IF or SW. Some thing you might look into.

I know your guildie has very limited time. When she gets on, show her how much you care and run her through some heroics and raids. have everyone pass on everything and have her need. She will quickly build up a nest egg of gold and gear and enchanting mats that she can use to get back on her feet.

We implemented a withdrawal limit last night, and like you I hate it. :( It runs counter to everything we’re trying to achieve, but I don’t really want to expose the guild to any more risk than we have to.

A good and strong statement. Although invariably someone will post that account security (or lacking thereof) plays a huge role in it. Yet without people paying for gold, there would be far less hacked accounts – since there would be no profit.

Cut off the profit (no more real money to be made), hacking will go down drastically.

What is really bad about this situation is that your guild was of the rare breed that builds on trust among members and got caught as collateral damage as well. Please don’t let this incident break your trust in people. But maybe remind them to take precaution to keep their account secure.

The note about account security being the responsibility of the account holder is worth noting, in one sense, as long as you’re not doing it from a blame the victim standpoint. “She should have protected her account better” is not helpful or useful – it implies it’s her own fault she got hacked, as though there’s no blame on the part of those who actually did the hacking. “In order to prevent future attacks, she should consider protecting her account”, on the other hand, is good.”

And it won’t break our trust in people, no worries. :) Hacking happens, and is more and more common these days. Even if Blizz hadn’t restored our GB, we’d have bitched and moaned for sure, but we’d have filled it up again just the same. Outside imposing a withdrawal limit for security reasons, nothing’s changed for us except that we’re maybe a little more paranoid about getting hacked! ^^

Definitely not blaming her. She was just on the receiving end of a long list of wrongdoers, and I know that even WITH proper measures, account hacking is still possible.

It’s just a sad fact that everyone should have to worry about basic security these days. Maybe your guild could pool and gift her an authenticator? It’s not that expensive and probably the easiest way to get her to trust ‘the system’ again after such an experience.

I honestly don’t understand the people who buy this stuff, though. Why? It makes no sense to me.

And what burns me the most is there’s no excuse anymore for believing it to be innocent or “clean.” You have to know by now that the money you’re buying is stolen. It makes you doubly complicit in the hacking/theft, because you’re enabling and encouraging it.

Our guild has been averaging one hacked member a month for the past year. (Although one guy was hacked three times) We’ve always had a limited withdraw system due to problems with new recruits. Blizzard does eventually mail the contents of the guild vault back to the GM. I can only imagine your GMs joy when he has to refill his bags umpteen times and resort everything back into the guild vault.

Happened to me as well. I paniced (sp?) when I saw that password change email. I had nothing but lowbies, but most of them still got deleted, and lots of spammer characters were created on various servers.

If I had known how easy and cheap the cellphone authenticator was, would have had that in place long before.
Hugs to your guildie, hope all the members get the authenticators.

The code is generated based upon the devices ID (serial number) and a timestamp (presumably something like seconds elapsed since whatever). Each code is valid for about two minutes (to account for lag etc) and can only be used once.

That’s why you have to sync it to your account, so the server knows which codes to accept. Gee, I just outed myself as software guy, didn’t I? :D

That’s actually kind of neat! I never knew that, and probably wouldn’t have guessed it. ^^ THe most I could come up with was “It probably sends a signal wirelessly to Blizzard to tell it what number its’ on…” but that seemed really flukey.

Our guild leader was hacked and the GB was being emptied as well as all his toons but those online figured it out and reported it so Blizzard was watching everything. When everything was restored, one of his toons had Herbalism leveled to 450 by the hacker (Bonus). He immediately got an authenticator so no more worries on his acct but we limited withdrawals from the bank to only 5 items per tab but left on tab with unlimited with drawls to make it easy for guildies to trade items through the bank.

I feel for both your guildmember and for your guild. We’ve had a few close calls in the past, involving the contents of our guild bank and it’s not been nice at all. Hopefully your guildy will get her stuff back, Blizzard seem to be returning items now a days.

Well, on the plus side the GB has been refilled (manually…geez it took forever) and she’s got most of her stuff back, though her professions have been inexplicably swapped for something else so she needs to reopen another ticket and see if they can restor her original set.

Sorry to drag this up again, but the topic currently is mentioned quite often in the blogs I follow. Gnomageddon has an article up about a hacked account as well.

But you should head over to killtenrats at http://www.killtenrats.com/2010/03/12/ibuygold and maybe offer another look at how gold buyers hurt regular players. They excuse themselves by not knowing the consequence – but seriously, since when is ignorance an excuse?

The word has to be spread just how buying gold hurts WoW, not the economy (which Tobold and Gevlon have covered already) but the players. Unrelated, unconnected, innocent players.